Confessions of a Cat-holic (225)

After I almost screwed up almost everything that could go wrong, I was told by Vic Garber that I might have to consider moving to another group and he said that if he was to give me an offer, I would have to take it no matter what. I asked him what group he wanted to place me at, he said it would be technology. Technology?! I couldn't even code. Why the hell did he want to place me in technology? He said I could keep exploring my options until Morgan Stanley gave me an offer.

I began to hear voices in my head and when people were talking on the phone in the office, I thought that they were mocking me. I started to suspect that they were digging up my old stuff, because I saw the book Selfish Gene on my table one day. That should not be a book found in a cubicle at a Wall Street financial institution. It was a biology related fiction. I felt that I had no choice but to make a bold decision to cut off everything that happened in the summer. I needed to get back to my old normal life in Hong Kong, instead of dreaming to date a foreigner in a foreign city which I had known very little about. If Eddie was a bit more caring and supportive, I guessed things could have worked out between us. I thought that I went strayed too much for too long away from my normal trajectory in Hong Kong. I should really just fall back onto my safety net.

So I quitted my job at Morgan Stanley and changed my flight to come back to Hong Kong sooner than planned. My big sister from alma mater, Kitty Cheung, the biotech expert from Columbia/Cornell/Harvard who wedded a Malaysian from MIT, said that she was friends with Sherri Tan, my co-worker from Lehman. And shortly after I came back from New York, I saw Sherri at IFC. She was very friendly. I wanted to be like her, a bit chubby, carefree and liked by Eric Tsang. She told me that Kirk Sweeney was looking to hire a junior sales and she asked me to try calling Kirk Sweeney up. They arranged a day of interviews for me. Eric Tsang also interviewed me at the American Club. And smoothly things went well. I secured an offer and I knew for certain that I would be joining Lehman in Hong Kong a year after. The offer was so good that I could not turn it down.

Despite the lucrative offer, I was on the edge of a mental breakdown. Edmond was very supportive though. He took me to all the fancy restaurants using his corporate card. And he said that he met many girls that year but nothing felt more familiar to be back together with me. I knew he probably went to Tokyo for paid sex so I was very cautious about having sex with him. Also, I might have been pregnant at the time, I really didn't want to have sex with another guy with a baby not his in my womb. That just felt too messed up. What if I was really pregnant? What if I was not? But emotionally, I felt that I needed some peace of mind, like someone who would assure me that things would still be okay even if I was pregnant with Eddie's baby. For that 6-7 months I got back together with Edmond, I didn't even take off my pants in front of him because of the long distance. We didn't have the chance to have sex at all, because he was too busy with his work. There was no opportunity for me to get lone time with him, he was just hand holding me in public the entire time. We didn't even kiss in his apartment when I visited his place. He said he was too busy with his work. He was on a conference call using bluetooth the entire time I was with him. He gave me his proper name card with a legitimate title and all that. I felt that maybe I should just succumb to societal pressure and get married with a banker and be a housewife, if circumstances allowed. Why would I move to a foreign country to get pregnant as a single mother if there was a Yale graduate from my hometown ready to marry me?

I was perceived to be a very bad woman by my circle of friends, because I looked like a girl who got pregnant with someone else's baby to fool my fiancé into getting married with me. To be honest, I thought about that as well.